Sunday, March 13, 2011

With record and download sales plummeting, the Dude side of the metal audience divide is becoming more obsessed with what it’s always obsessed about–being ‘authentic’ and ‘troo’. The fashion result is a rigidly conservative dress code of jeans, band tee and middle-parted long hair that only seldom sees the business end of a shampoo bottle.

On the War’s other side: bands fully participating in this, the most drop-dead exciting period in metal history by dressing to match. Bands who understand that what you wear can be, should be, I’d argue, a reflecting image of what you sound like—which is a working definition of one of the many things fashion is about.

These Fashion Bands suffer no ceiling on the size of their audience, what with them appealing to both sexes while Troo Dudes take a perverse pride in their incredibly limited, all-male audience. Which you might say something to do with metal in general being literally, anxiously, and often hilariously homosexual.But more on that sort of thing later.